The yacht, Clio, is owned by Oleg Deripaska, the founder of the Russian aluminum group Rusal who was sanctioned by the US in 2018. Clio dropped anchor off Malé, the capital of the Maldives, on Monday, AFP said, citing port officials.
At least two other superyachts owned by Russian billionaires set sail for the Maldives shortly after Western nations threatened to seize assets from sanctioned oligarchs, according to data from MarineTraffic reported by CNBC.
In a tweet Saturday, the White House said: “This coming week, we will launch a multilateral Transatlantic task force to identify, hunt down, and freeze the assets of sanctioned Russian companies and oligarchs — their yachts, their mansions, and any other ill-gotten gains that we can find and freeze under the law.”
Deripaska’s 73-meter Clio “was designed for long voyages around the world and self-sufficient living for several months at a time,” according to its maker, Lürssen.
The Biden administration recently targeted 10 Russian oligarchs as part of a sweeping package of sanctions against Russia. The sanctions aim to financially cripple the country’s wealthiest members in retaliation for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Belarusian president displays map suggesting Putin plans to attack Moldova
Grayson Quay, Weekend editor – March 1, 2022
Alexander Lukashenko MAXIM GUCHEK/BELTA/AFP via Getty Images
Russia may be planning aggressive moves against the Republic of Moldova, according to a map Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko displayed during a meeting of his country’s security council.
Lukashenko is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He seemingly allowed Putin to use Belarus as a staging ground for his invasion of Ukraine and is reportedly planning to commit his own country’s troops to the conflict.
The map, which Financial Times Moscow bureau chief Max Seddon shared on Twitter, shows Ukraine split into its four operational command districts and features red arrows that appear to indicate planned troop movements.
One of those arrows originates in the southern Ukrainian port city of Odessa, which Russian troops have not yet reached, and terminates on the other side of the Moldovan border.
In January, Ukrainian intelligence warned that Russia could initiate false flag operations in Moldova to justify intervening in the pro-Russian separatist-controlled region of Transnistria, according to Al Jazeera.
Transnistria, a narrow strip of land with around 400,000 inhabitants, is internationally recognized as part of Moldova, but the Moldovan government has exercised no authority over the breakaway republic since 1992. Russian troops have been stationed in Transnistria ever since.
In 2014, after Putin seized control of Crimea, the head of Transnistria’s parliament requested to join Russia, BBC reported at the time.
Ukrainian officials and two Republican members of Congress have pushed for the United States to implement a no-fly zone as Russia’s invasion continues, but doing so would mark a major escalation in the war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, via a statement to Axios on Monday, called on President Biden and NATO to impose a no-fly zone over “significant parts” of his country, saying that “if the West does this, Ukraine will defeat the aggressor with much less blood.” Zelensky tweeted Tuesday morning that he had told German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that Europeans supporting Ukraine needed to “close the sky.”
In an interview with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Tuesday, Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksandra Ustinova continued to make the case.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv on Monday. (Presidency of Ukraine/Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
“We need to protect our sky, and that’s why we need a no-fly zone,” Ustinova said. “I know this is something that nobody wants to talk about because everybody is scared of Vladimir Putin. … My only question here to the international community would be, what is the red line for him? What is the red line when you actually step in? How many children have to die?”
On Friday, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., called for the implementation of a no-fly zone, stating that it would “disrupt Russias air [operations] to give the heroic Ukrainians a fair fight. It’s now, or later.”
Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., joined him on Monday.
“Clearly, in the absence of a U.N. resolution, which Russia would veto, a strong coalition of like-minded nations should step in and seriously consider this,” Wicker told HuffPost in an interview.
“Tens of thousands of women and children fleeing from Kyiv west have created a humanitarian situation that the international community needs to step in and be involved in,” he added. According to the United Nations, more than 100 civilians have already been killed since Russia launched its invasion last week, although the real number could be higher than that.
To actually enforce a no-fly zone, NATO would likely need to shoot down any Russian aircraft that violated the declaration, an open attack on a nation with nearly 6,000 nuclear weapons. (On Monday, Biden said Americans should not be worried about nuclear war with Russia.)
The U.S. and its allies have implemented multiple no-fly zones in recent decades over countries with much less powerful militaries, such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the 1990s and Libya in 2011.
Flight tracker website Flightradar24 shows no aircraft flying over Ukraine following the Russian attack. (Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The concept of a no-fly zone over Ukraine appears to have gained no traction with the Biden administration. Press secretary Jen Psaki said at Monday’s White House briefing that implementing one would require “deploying U.S. military to enforce, which would be … potentially a direct conflict, and potentially a war with Russia, which is something we are not planning to be a part of.”
During Monday’s Department of Defense briefing, a reporter asked Pentagon press secretary John Kirby whether mounting civilian casualties could lead the U.S. to implementing a no-fly zone. Kirby answered, “No,” and moved on with the briefing.
There was bipartisan support of that position from Capitol Hill.
“There’s been a lot of loose talk from smart people about ‘close air support’ and ‘no fly zones’ for Ukraine,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., tweeted. “Let’s just be clear what that is — the U.S. and Russia at war. It’s a bad idea and Congress would never authorize it.
“Military equipment for Ukraine, humanitarian support for Ukraine, crippling sanction on Russia, movement of U.S. troops to the eastern flank of NATO — these are all the right moves,” he continued. “But direct war between the world’s two nuclear powers should be a non-starter.”
“People have to understand what that means,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told reporters Monday evening when asked about the possibility of a no-fly zone. “That means a willingness to shoot down Russian planes. And that would mean World War III.”
President Biden at the White House on Monday. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
International allies in Europe also ruled out the possibility. United Kingdom Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said last week that implementing a no-fly zone would put “British fighter jets directly against Russian fighter jets” and that “NATO would have to effectively declare war on Russia because that’s what you would do.”
“We have no intentions of moving into Ukraine, neither on the ground or in the airspace,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told NBC News in a Monday interview. “We have a responsibility to make sure that this doesn’t spiral out of control and escalate even further into concern for full-fledged war in Europe involving NATO allies.”
‘Show this to Putin’: A 6-year-old girl killed in Ukraine
Photographs by Evgeniy Maloletka – February 28, 2022
A mother stands by as a paramedic performs CPR on her daughter inside an ambulance at a hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, on Sunday, February 27. Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
Editor’s note: This gallery contains graphic images. Viewer discretion is advised.
A wounded 6-year-old girl arrived at a hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine, on Sunday.
Her mother wept outside the ambulance. Her father was at her side, covered in blood.
The family was at a supermarket on the outskirts of the southeastern port city when Russian shelling started, according to the Associated Press.
Now, a medical team was racing to save the young girl’s life.
“Take her out! Take her out! We can make it!” a hospital worker shouted.
They placed her onto a gurney and wheeled her inside, where doctors and nurses fought to revive her.
But she could not be saved.
A doctor who was pumping oxygen into her looked into the camera of an Associated Press videojournalist in the room.
“Show this to Putin,” he said. “The eyes of this child, and crying doctors.”
The girl, whose name was not immediately known, was injured by shelling in a residential area, according to the Associated Press. At left is her father.Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
Hospital workers transport the girl onto a gurney to take her inside the hospital.Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
Doctors and nurses inside the hospital fight to revive the girl. She could not be saved.Evgeniy Maloletka/AP
The girl’s lifeless body lies in the hospital room, covered by her jacket.
Russia says it won’t yield to sanctions pressure over Ukraine
March 1, 2022
A view shows the area near the regional administration building in Kharkiv
MOSCOW (Reuters) -Western sanctions will never make Russia change its position on Ukraine, the Kremlin said on Tuesday.
Responding to a barrage of Western sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said: “They are counting on forcing us to change our position. This is out of the question.”
Peskov told reporters that President Vladimir Putin had been briefed on a first round of talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials on Monday but it was too early to judge the outcome.
There were no plans for talks between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, he said, adding that Moscow still recognised Zelenskiy as Ukraine’s leader.
Zelenskiy, he said, could prevent further casualties if he gave the command to lay down arms.
Ukraine has refused to surrender and its forces have put up strong resistance to Russia’s assault from the north, east and south, which Moscow describes as a special operation to demilitarise and “denazify” the country – a justification dismissed by Kyiv and the West as war propaganda.
Peskov dismissed allegations of Russian strikes on civilian targets and the use of cluster bombs and vacuum bombs as fakes. He categorically denied that Russia had committed war crimes.
Ukraine says large numbers of civilians have been killed. Peskov said, without providing evidence, that Ukrainian nationalist groups were using people as human shields.
Peskov declined to comment on whether the Kremlin considers the capital Kyiv to be under the control of Nazis, referring the question to the Russian military.
Ukraine and Russia are still fighting for control of the skies 5 days into the war, US defense official says
Julie Coleman – February 28, 2022
Ukraine and Russia are still fighting for control of the skies 5 days into the war, US defense official saysSukhoi Su-25 jet aircraft, like the ones that Russia positioned near Ukraine and has reportedly used in its offensive against the country. Photo by Marina Lystseva\TASS via Getty Images
A senior US official said Ukraine’s airspace remains contested, contradicting Moscow’s claims.
Russia was expected to swiftly knock out Ukraine’s air defense capabilities, but that has not happened.
Ukraine has claimed to have shot down Russian fighter jets, helicopters, and even troop transport planes.
Despite Russian claims to the contrary, Ukraine’s airspace remains contested as the country’s forces fight to repel Russian aggression, a senior US defense official said on Monday during an off-camera press briefing.
“The Russians have not achieved air superiority over the whole country,” the official told reporters. “Ukrainian air defenses remain intact and viable in terms of aircraft and missile defense systems, and they’re engaged.”
“It’s a contested airspace, and it’s a very dynamic airspace,” the official continued, contradicting Moscow’s claims this morning that Russia has “total air superiority” over Ukraine.
Planes apparently in the sky over the Kiev region. As a result, a plane of the Russian army was hit.Photo by Aleksandr Gusev/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
It has been five days since Russia launched a large-scale attack on Ukraine, attacking the country from several directions and pushing towards Kyiv, the capital city. Russian forces have conducted bombardments of positions in and around Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, forcing numerous civilians to take shelter in basements and metro stations.
One video uploaded to Twitter on Monday shows incoming and outgoing fire over Kyiv, which appears consistent with an engagement between aviation assets and air-defense systems.
Another video posted on social media Monday appeared to show surface-to-air missiles targeting air assets, purportedly over Kyiv.
In recent days, Ukraine has claimed to have shot down fighters, helicopters, and even transport planes. Early in the fighting against Russia, for instance, Ukraine’s armed forces said that they had downed five Russian aircraft and a helicopter, CNN reported, but the Russian military denied these claims.
Russia only recently acknowledged taking losses in the conflict with Ukraine, but it insists that Ukrainian losses are significantly worse than its own.
A video that was released by Ukraine’s military last Thursday seemed to show one helicopter being shot down over Hostomel, a town on the outskirts of Kyiv, and Ukraine’s Armed Forces posted a video of what was said to be a damaged Russian helicopter in that area.
Ukraine’s top general Valeriy Zaluzhiny claimed Friday that the country’s armed forces shot down a Russian Ilyushin Il-76 plane near Kyiv, the Kyiv Independent reported.
The Ukrainian military, according to The War Zone, also said it shot down a helicopter and a Su-25 close-air support aircraft with an S-300 missile system.
Russia was expected to quickly eliminate Ukraine’s air defense capabilities earlier in the conflict, but so far that does not appear to have happened.
Trump, Who Wanted to Withdraw the U.S. from NATO, Now Claims Credit for Its Existence
Peter Wade – February 28, 2022
Donald Trump – Credit: Evan Vucci/AP
Former President Donald Trump, who has a long history of denigrating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and who, as president, discussed removing the U.S. from the alliance, has now claimed credit for its existence. He’s also patting himself on the back for supplying Ukraine with weapons, despite once threatening to withhold security assistance from the country unless it helped smear Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 election.
“I hope everyone is able to remember that it was me, as President of the United States, that got delinquent NATO members to start paying their dues, which amounted to hundreds of billions of dollars,” Trump wrote in a statement released Monday. “There would be no NATO if I didn’t act strongly and swiftly.”
“It was me that got Ukraine the very effective anti-tank busters (Javelins) when the previous Administration was sending blankets. Let History so note!” Trump added, conveniently ignoring that he was impeached for withholding $400 million worth of congressionally approved military aid from the nation in an attempt to extort President Volodymyr Zelensky into manufacturing dirt on Biden and his family.
The statement is yet another attempt by Trump to rewrite “History” by painting himself as NATO’s greatest ally. In one of the former president’s books, The America We Deserve, which was published in 2000, he claimed that money the U.S. sent to NATO was wasted. “America has no vital interest in choosing between warring factions whose animosities go back centuries in Eastern Europe,” he wrote, according to The Daily Beast. “Their conflicts are not worth American lives. Pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually. The cost of stationing NATO troops in Europe is enormous. And these are clearly funds that can be put to better use.”
Trump’s acrimony toward NATO continued into his presidential campaign and throughout his administration. In a 2016 interview with TheNew York Times, Trump described NATO as “obsolete” and “unfair, economically, to … the United States.” As president, Trump berated other NATO nations for not meeting certain fundraising benchmarks and toyed with the idea of leaving the alliance. According to the Times, Trump in 2018 “told his top national security officials that he did not see the point of the military alliance, which he presented as a drain on the United States.”
Reacting to the news Trump wanted to withdraw from NATO, Michèle A. Flournoy, who served as under secretary of defense under former President Barack Obama, told the Times that to do so “would be one of the most damaging things that any president could do to U.S. interests.”
While he is now trying to portray himself as Ukraine’s savior and on Saturday called Russia’s attack “appalling,” Trump only days before praised Putin for the invasion, saying on a podcast, “Putin declared a big portion of … Ukraine … as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. … I said, ‘How smart is that?’”
Putin’s war is gambling with Russia’s future. He’s going to lose this bet.
Brian LaPierre – February 26, 2022
Alexei Nikolsky/Kremlin Pool Photo via AP
Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is a cynical, brutal and inhumane example of the discredited and obsolete principle that “might makes right.”
Singlehandedly, Putin has plunged Europe into the worst military crisis since WWII and sank American-Russian relations to the worst depths of the Cold War period. With this obscene and grotesque invasion, Putin is gambling with the future of the country he has misruled and dominated for over two decades. Putin will lose this bet because his war is more than an exercise in ethical and legal nihilism. It is self-defeating.
Through his aggression, Putin has brought about the very outcomes against which he claims to be fighting. Instead of restoring its power, he has isolated Russia diplomatically and smeared its international reputation. Apart from his autocratic allies in China and Mar-a-Lago, Putin has united the world against him and reinforced its commitment to contain Russian expansionism. In contrast to the disunity and ambiguities of the Trump era, Putin has revitalized and given new urgency to both NATO and the Euro-Atlantic alliance of liberal democracies. Rather than rolling back America’s military presence in the former Soviet space, Putin’s hostile policies have led to increased military deployments on Russia’s western frontier.
Putin’s war has also exposed the Russian nation to potentially crippling economic warfare. Sanctions and countersanctions will hurt everyone. They will hit Russia harder and damage it more deeply given his country’s lack of economic depth, diversification and dynamism. If the sanctions regime is robust, unified, and lengthy, Russia will not be able to escape this economic noose through cryptocurrency transactions, Chinese support and internal currency reserves. As the ruble tanks and Russians watch the accumulated purchasing power of their hard-earned savings, pensions, and scholarships disappear, many Russians will wonder whether Putin’s military adventure abroad is worth the price of their lowered living standards and livelihoods.
Militarily, Russia has the force to overwhelm Ukraine in this opening phase of conventional military operations. Russia does not have the force, however, to occupy and control Ukraine in the long term through violence alone. Nor can it do so in the face of widespread Ukrainian opposition, resistance, and prolonged insurgency. While it will be easy to invade Ukraine, Putin will find that it is difficult to pacify it, impossible to Russify it, and dangerous to withdraw from it.
Lastly, I do not (and cannot) believe that the Russian public supports this war. For all his false flag operations, disinformation, and posturing, Putin has not prepared Russia to support a war of aggression and territorial aggrandizement in Ukraine. If this conflict is bloody and protracted, it will be deeply distressing and increasingly unpopular with the average Russian. It will also be deeply destructive to Putin’s political image and domestic reputation as a competent and rational technocrat.
Tragically, it is the ordinary people who will suffer the most from Putin’s hubris and mistakes. Undoubtedly, however, this war will produce many more collateral casualties. One of them—unbeknownst to all the cronies and sycophants in the Kremlin—may be Vladimir Putin’s domestic popularity, legitimacy, and power.
By Dr. Brian LaPierre is an associate professor of history at The University of Southern Mississippi School of Humanities. You can reach him at
The digestible Ukraine explainer you’ve been waiting for
A geopolitical expert answers your burning questions around the Russia–Ukraine conflict.
By Neal Freyman – February 22, 2022
Photo Illustration: Dianna “Mick” McDougall; Source: Anadolu Agency, Naeblys, Matthew Stockman via Getty Images
The Russia–Ukraine conflict has officially replaced NFTs as the topic people love to talk about but don’t fully understand. That’s not a knock on anyone—look, even those of us who follow the news for our jobs haven’t spent the last decade immersed in Eastern European politics.
But we know someone who has: Alex Kliment, a geopolitical analyst who helps write and edit the excellent Signal, a global affairs newsletter published by GZERO Media (you can find it here). We asked Alex some high-level questions about the situation to get a better grasp on what exactly is going on and why we should care.
Can you give us a brief history of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine?
To start with, the “brief” history goes back a thousand years, because Russian civilization more or less began in what is today’s Ukraine: Medieval Kyiv was bumping while Moscow was still a backwater. This sounds irrelevant but Putin alludes to this all the time as part of his reasons for wanting to bring Ukraine under Russian control.
After the middle ages, the lands of today’s Ukraine were part of various European empires, including, of course, the Tsarist and Soviet ones, both of which worried about Ukrainian nationalism and wanted to Russify the population and culture. (The Ukrainian language is related to Russian but different, think of Italian and Spanish.)
There have been some particularly dark moments in their history: Stalin starved millions of Ukrainians to death in the 1930s. There’s a reason that Ukraine’s national anthem begins with, “Ukraine is not dead yet.”
Since 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has been an independent state, but it’s been caught in a tug of war between Russia and the West. There are a lot of ethnic Russians in Ukraine, particularly in the east and south, and those are areas where you find more sympathy for Moscow. Central and western Ukraine have tended to show more pro-Western sentiment, but it’s very, very hard to generalize. There are also a lot of family ties between the two countries—just about everyone in Ukraine has relatives somewhere in Russia.
The Kremlin, for its part, sees Ukraine as a nonnegotiable part of its sphere of influence. The idea of Ukraine ever joining NATO (which has been floated in various ways) is an existential red line for Russia. But there’s also this other thing going on where Putin openly doesn’t believe Ukraine is a legit independent country. For him it’s basically just a part of a greater Russian empire that it’s his destiny to resurrect. Most people in Ukraine obviously don’t love this view.
On Monday Putin recognized the independence of two Ukrainian separatist regions: Donetsk and Luhansk. What the heck are “separatist” regions and why was this viewed as such a provocative move?
In 2014, after a popular uprising ousted the pro-Russian president of Ukraine and led to a new, Western-backed government that featured some strident Ukrainian nationalists, Russia did two things:
It annexed the Crimean peninsula, the only part of Ukraine where ethnic Russians were the majority.
It also backed militants in two eastern provinces who set up breakaway statelets of their own. Russia said it was protecting Russian speakers—whose language rights were in fact under threat at the time—from genocide.
The result was a civil war between those separatists and Ukrainian forces which has so far killed about 14,000 people and displaced close to 1 million.
Since 2015 there’s been a peace deal on paper: the “Minsk agreements.” It was a pretty good deal for Russia, actually. The separatist regions would remain part of Ukraine, but with significant autonomy and an effective veto over Kyiv’s foreign policy. They’ve basically been cat’s paws for Moscow to keep Ukraine from ever moving Westward.
But that agreement was never implemented, in part because neither side could agree on who should move first. Now, by unilaterally recognizing the independence of the separatist entities, Russia is giving up on that peace agreement entirely, and (again, as with Crimea) forcibly changing the borders of a European country.
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UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said this would be the biggest war in Europe since World War II. But there have been other European conflicts since, so what makes this one so much more significant?
Well for one thing, it’s the sheer size of the players. Yugoslavia’s horrific 1990s civil war—the worst European conflict since WWII—took place in a disintegrating country of 23.5 million people. Ukraine has more than 40 million people and, mind you, one of the combatants is a nuclear power.
Second, a central idea of postwar Europe is that you don’t redraw European boundaries by force, because that always ends very badly. And yet here is Russia, a major world power, doing just that. So Russia’s challenge isn’t only to a specific country (Ukraine) but to a whole order.
Third, there’s obviously a huge economic dimension here. We’re talking about a war involving a country—Russia—that is Europe’s largest source of natural gas and is a major global oil exporter. No European war has involved anything close to this level of economic and financial risk to Europe since 1945.
On that note, if Western leaders think Russia’s actions are so harmful to European security, why isn’t the US sending troops?
The US public has little appetite for foreign military adventures—and after the past 20 years, frankly, who could blame them?
There’s also an understandable reluctance to get into a direct conflict with a nuclear power over a country that is not, in fact, a NATO member. So the West is using different tools to try to manage the situation: arming the Ukrainians better, bolstering defenses in the NATO countries that border Ukraine, and hitting Russia with sanctions.
What is the most likely outcome of the war? Is Russia guaranteed to capture as much territory as it wants? Will Ukrainian forces put up a fight?
The Ukrainians are certainly no pushovers. They’ve been well-armed and trained by the West since 2014. That said, the Russian forces are just much, much larger, and in the event of a full-scale invasion, most military analysts think that the Russians could get to key cities quite fast.
The interesting question, though, is what happens next. Invading a country is one thing, but actually occupying it—if that’s Putin’s intention—is another. The Russians would not, in most cases, be “greeted as liberators,” as the saying goes. I’m not a military analyst but I’m told that things could get very nasty in the event of urban warfare or a popular insurgency. And the West would almost certainly support efforts to make life hell for the occupying Russians.
Serious question: Is Putin simply out of his gourd? Is there any world in which the benefits of an invasion outweigh the costs, or is he behaving like TonyMontananear the end of Scarface?
A lot of people have wondered if Putin is nuts with this Ukraine stuff. I think it’s probably the wrong question. The right question is: Is he consistent? Certainly from a Western point of view it seems crazy to risk Russia’s economic stability and global standing over whether a neighbor wants to join NATO or not.
But Putin is operating on a different standard. He and those around him truly believe—and have long believed—that Ukraine moving into the West’s orbit would be an existential threat to his regime and the security of his country in a way that Western sanctions just aren’t. Morning Brew’s write-up did a great job explaining why Putin is probably OK risking sanctions to get what he wants here.
So in a way he’s doing a kind of cost-benefit analysis that I’m not sure Tony Montana, in his final moments of inspiration, was similarly capable of.
Putin may end up being wrong, but I don’t think he’s crazy.
Comment:
tarbabys isn’t so sure Putin isn’t crazy. The entire civilized world told him that invading Ukraine was a crazy idea, that the world would bring a heavy ass-woopin set of sanctions, if he went through with his 19th century ideas of Russian empire.
He of course didn’t believe or listen to anyone, not his flunkies, not his oligarch buddies, not his military advisors (especially not the conscripted soldiers who hadn’t a clue where they were going and what they were supposed to do) and certainly not the Russian people, who have family members at the receiving end of the missiles, rockets, tank shells, cluster bombs and thermobaric weapons.
Now the entire world has turned Russia into an isolated pariah with an economy that is cratering faster that the oligarchs yachts and jets have fled to the Maldives.
Will Putin admit that he made the biggest political and military blunder in Russian history or will he double down on destroying Ukraine and building a massive documented and real time recorded war crime record for all the world to see. His own survival is in the balance.
The larger of the two disinformation groups operated in Russia, as well as the Russian-dominated Donbas and Crimea regions of Ukraine.
Ben Collins and Jo Ling Kent – February 28, 2022
Facebook and Twitter removed two anti-Ukrainian “covert influence operations” over the weekend, one tied to Russia and another with connections to Belarus, the companies said.
One of the operations, a propaganda campaign featuring a website pushing anti-Ukraine talking points, was an offshoot of a known Russian disinformation operation. A Facebook spokesperson said it used computer-generated faces to bolster the credibility of fake columnists across several platforms, including Instagram.
The other campaign used hacked accounts to push similar anti-Ukraine propaganda and was tied to a known Belarusian hacking group.
Disinformation experts warned that Russia is expected to continue to try to manipulate narratives about Ukraine — most notably around the claims made by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The announcement also demonstrates that Russia continues to use disinformation strategies first identified years ago around the 2016 election, albeit with some advancements — most notably the use of software that can create realistic and original human faces.
The larger of the two disinformation groups operated in Russia, as well as the Russian-dominated Donbas and Crimea regions of Ukraine, said Nathaniel Gleicher, Meta’s head of security policy, and it is tied to the websites News Front and South Front, which the U.S. government has designated as part of a broader disinformation effort that had connections to Russian intelligence. (Meta is the parent company of Facebook.)
Gleicher said in an interview that the propaganda campaign was able to “seed stories across the internet that Ukraine isn’t doing well” by “pretending to be journalists based in Kyiv.”
“The good news is that neither of these campaigns have been that effective, but we do see these actors trying to target Ukraine at this point,” he said.
“These actors are trying to undermine trust in the Ukrainian government, suggest that it’s a failed state, suggest that the war is going very poorly in Ukraine or trying to praise Russia.”
Facebook removed profiles related to News Front and South Front in 2020, and the company confirmed to NBC News that the new group shared connections to the accounts that were previously banned. Both websites have pushed misleading articles, questioning the results of the 2020 presidential election and the efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines. The State Department identified the websites as Russian disinformation outlets in a 2020 report.
The websites featured articles pushing Russian talking points like “Zelensky is building a neo-Nazi dictatorship in Ukraine” and “Why Ukraine will only get worse.” As of Sunday night, the sites still featured the biographies and computer-generated faces of the columnists and linked out to their accounts on VKontakte, Russia’s Facebook competitor.
Facebook said it took down 40 profiles tied to the disinformation operation, saying the profiles were a small part of a larger persona-building operation that spread across Twitter, Instagram, Telegram and Russian social networks.
Accounts tied to the websites were still active on Telegram, the Russian social networks and YouTube on Sunday night.
Twitter said it banned more than a dozen accounts tied to the News Front and South Front Russian operation, which were pushing links to a new propaganda site called Ukraine Today.
“On Feb. 27, we permanently suspended more than a dozen accounts and blocked sharing of several links in violation of our platform manipulation and spam policy. Our investigation is ongoing; however, our initial findings indicate that the accounts and links originated in Russia and were attempting to disrupt the public conversation around the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement.
Later on Monday, Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokesperson, said the company has taken down a series of channels tied to a Russian influence operation, though the channels have very low numbers of subscribers.
Facebook said it took down a separate multipronged disinformation operation by a known hacking group based out of Belarus that targeted Ukrainians. The company said it hacked social media accounts to use them to spread pro-Russian propaganda.
The hackers targeted journalists, military personnel and local public officials in Ukraine, using compromised email accounts and passwords to log into their Facebook profiles. The hacked accounts would then post a video of what they said was a Ukrainian waving a white flag of surrender.
Facebook attributed the efforts to the hacking group Ghostwriter, which previously used hacked accounts to push disinformation that favored the Belarus government. The Ghostwriter hacking group works for the Belarus government, according to the cybersecurity firm Mandiant.
As for who will be targeted next, Renée DiResta, the research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said it is “unlikely” to be U.S. users.
“What you would see would most likely be coming out of either existing real influencers who are part of that sphere of influence that Russia has established already or media properties,” she said. “It does take some time to spin up a network of fake accounts.”
